NRS webinar-Immunological Advances in Asthma
“Characteristics of severe asthma patients across SHARP Registry at different age ranges: First Results of The ELSA Working Group”
“The immune landscape of the lower airways in childhood-onset asthma”
Dr. Stefania Principe, MD PhD, is a respiratory physician and Postdoctoral researcher at the Pulmonary Department of Amsterdam UMC. Her work focuses on severe asthma and precision medicine, with a strong interest in biomarker-driven approaches and mechanisms of treatment response/remission in severe asthma. She is involved in European collaborations such as 3TR-ABC and ONELAB, where she works on linking clinical phenotypes with molecular data. In parallel, she works with real-world data on severe asthma from registries such as the European severe asthma registry SHARP and the Dutch RAPSODI working on patient stratification and long-term risk modelling. Stefania also teaches in the Master of Personalized Medicine at VU Amsterdam and is part of the Young Investigator Board of the Netherlands Respiratory Society (NRS).
Professor Marijn Nawijn is a translational scientist, trained as an immunologist and molecular geneticist. His research focuses on uncovering the molecular mechanisms involved in the initiation, exacerbation, and remission of complex, chronic inflammatory diseases of the respiratory tract, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The overarching aim of his workis to develop novel strategies for the prevention and treatment of these highly prevalent disorders.
To achieve this, Martijn combinesstate-of-the-art single-cell technologies with functional genomic and molecular biological approaches. His research utilizes primary cells and tissues fromboth patients and healthy controls to determine how genetic susceptibility contributes to altered biological processes during disease progression. Validation and functional follow-up are performed using advanced 3D primary cell cultures, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), and image analysis.
He serves as the coordinator of the Lung Bionetwork within the Human Lung Cell Atlas consortium. As a strong advocate of open team science, Martijn believes that collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches are essential to addressing the major scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century. He actively contributes his expertise in molecular genetics and single-cell biology to interdisciplinary teams that include clinicians, bioinformaticians, imaging and single-cell technology specialists, and pharmacologists, all working together to develop curative interventions for asthma and COPD.
